Archive for the 'Set Lists' Tag Under 'Soundcheck' Category

His timing is as impeccable as his effortlessly cool manner behind a grand piano. Nearly a decade after slipping into the mainstream with his smooth debut, Get Lifted – and in the same week that his biggest-selling song, the new wedding favorite “All of Me,” has become the highest-charting single of his career, nearly reaching No. 1 – John Legend has returned with the ultimate intimate experience some fans and critics have craved from him all along.

Not that his shows ever lack for subdued, stripped-down moments. No matter how energized his productions get, each set eventually reduces to the same basics that made Nat King Cole a star. It’s been the 35-year-old’s forté since the days when he was a session cat tickling ivories for the likes of Lauryn Hill.

He’s grown much more comfortable in his performance skin over the years; initially he was as awkward as a hotel-lounge Lionel Richie impersonator. But even now, having proved with last year’s dates behind Love in the Future that he has a sharper feel for the spotlight, pitched somewhere between Maxwell’s suavity and Seal’s polite swagger, Legend is still most engaging while seated. So often when he steps to the mic, you can catch him thinking; when he’s behind the keys, everything comes naturally, and his singing – both those sweet falsetto highs and throatier notes – resounds more vividly.

For his latest tour, named after his current smash (so popular it has risen three places higher than the Frozen anthem “Let It Go”), that fundamental approach is all there is, and it’s captivating: Just the man relaxing at the piano, resetting gems from all four albums into an enveloping two-hour experience, with occasional help from guitarist Ryan Lerman and a string quartet.

They’ve impressed so many times in the past decade at Southern California spots both big and small that it can still be tricky for longtime admirers of the National – the dramatically intense and unpredictably startling group from Cincinnati – to discern a tremendous performance from a merely great one. That conundrum, however, makes it much easier to spot an altogether weaker set.

Granted, an off night from the National is still stronger than the mightiest turns from virtually any indie peer aside from Arcade Fire and Wilco, bands that are similarly a breed apart. Like those singular outfits, there’s a perpetually burgeoning flame at the center of this quintet’s chemistry, an ineffable force with familial bonds that holds the group together tight enough to stay musically married but loose enough to keep surprising one another.

Sometimes, as with Tuesday’s special occasion at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, that fire doesn’t burn as brightly or as consistently as you might desire – it smolders and flickers instead. How do you know when the National isn’t entirely on its game? When a movie about (but not really about) them tops the night’s highlight reel.

Maybe because that aspect of it is freshest, but my mind has been returning less to standout songs from the show (“Squalor Victoria” was wickedly torrential) than to the film that was previewed in the first half of the evening.

It’s not all that often you truly feel the love flowing from artist to audience and back. But midway through Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ stellar set at the Wiltern on Tuesday, you’d have to have had a lump of coal in your chest not to feel the emotions of the moment.

Jones, you’ll recall, was supposed to hit the road last year, but in June a cancer diagnosis threw plans for a tour and new album into limbo. Now healthy, the 57-year-old acknowledged the uncertainty of those months in a testimonial during a gospel-style break amid a new tune, “Get Up and Get Out.”

“You see, I got something to shout about because a few months ago ... I did not know I would be here tonight,” Jones spoke-sang as her 10-piece band vamped behind her. “Tonight that shout is about that cancer, when I said, ‘Get up and get out!’”

The audience burst into cheers and applause, and for a moment it felt like you were in a group hug with 1,600 or so of your brand-new best friends.

Last time Kings of Leon played the Forum, they were still riding high from the double-platinum success of Only by the Night and three chart-topping alternative rock singles. The resulting concert was electrifying.

Flash-forward 41/2 years and a lot has changed: Most of the Tennessee band is married with children, and the venerable Inglewood venue has undergone a major overhaul. The band’s sixth studio release Mechanical Bull reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 upon release last September but didn’t sell like gangbusters, though it spawned three more Top 20 alt-radio hits.

Some among Friday’s crowd obviously hadn’t heard about the media blitz or the Eagles’ extended run accompanying the arena’s reopening in January. A pair of clueless (or possibly inebriated) young ladies at the box office asked whether seating was indoors or outdoors.

Local Natives definitely knew about the Forum’s history. At one point during their rapturous 45-minute opening set, co-vocalist/guitarist Taylor Rice said, “I can feel the Lakers’ presence here.”

Last April, Lady Antebellum ramped up for the May release of its fourth proper album, Golden, with an intimate set inside Disneyland’s Golden Horseshoe Saloon, a venue suited to its stripped-down production.

Since then, Hillary Scott, the female third of the platinum-selling country trio, took time off to have a baby, and while she and cohorts Charles Kelley and Dave Haywood were on break, they put out a deluxe edition of their latest effort, including a new hit, “Compass.”

Nearly a year after co-headlining the last Stagecoach festival, the group is back on the road, and Golden has morphed into the Take Me Downtown Tour, named for its first single and delayed from last fall to a late-winter start.

As with its 2012 outing, which packed Staples Center in Los Angeles, this latest show has been supersized for larger spaces such as Citizen’s Business Bank Arena in Ontario, where the tour made its first of three Southern California stops Saturday night. (It also plays March 23 at Sleep Train Amphitheatre in Chula Vista, then returns June 14 to headline Irvine’s Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.”

He brought the same ensemble to the Hollywood Palladium on Friday and Saturday night – the all-female 3rdEyeGirl, the 11-piece NPG Horns and various singers, dancers and, for the second show, hypeman and human beat-boxer Doug E. Fresh – yet he performed two very different shows. Both were strong in their own distinct way, but taken together they were a breathtaking demonstration of Prince’s enormous talent as a bandleader and arranger.

Friday’s set was a “semi-secret” event piggybacked onto a showcase of Liv Warfield, one of Prince’s latest protégés. Her uneven hour-long performance, plugging her new album The Unexpected, proved her to be an earthy, gospel shouter whose voice outshone her material. But His Purpleness may have been too clever by half with his coy, will-he-or-won’t-he actions, including hinting tweets that were immediately deleted. He ended up playing to a room barely one-third full, with absolutely no buzz of anticipation.

All pretense of secrecy was dropped Saturday, as the marquee was changed to announce his performance and fans lined up for guaranteed-entry wristbands by the afternoon. But the ultimately just-as-sparse crowd was still slow arriving to hear the late-coming Prince. (He has many fine qualities, but promptness isn’t among them.)

You wonder sometimes when the aging legend is finally going to lose his edge. Certainly with an iconic country star like Merle Haggard, who turns 77 next month and has beaten back cancer once already in his well-traveled life, any time through town might be his last.

But not yet do we need worry about Merle. For in his latest stop at City National Grove of Anaheim, a place he and his band the Strangers seem to swing by every year now, Haggard arrived in as fine a form as ever, delivering 19 songs in more than 80 minutes.

Maybe he’s a little more laid-back in performance than he was in younger days, and sure, his voice can seem a little softer at times. But like straight whiskey aged in oak, time reveals new flavors, adding nuance and a lived-in feel to Hag’s old familiar sound.

“Turn me loose, set me free,” he sang in the show-opening “Big City,” and though the protagonist of that song dreams of escaping the workaday week for the peace and quiet of the high plains of Montana, you’ve got to figure that for Haggard there’s always been freedom on the road.

What a treat these All for the Hall shows continue to be, and how fortunate for fans of the format that the series has returned to Los Angeles, where it began at the site of Tuesday night’s event, Club Nokia, after three years in New York.

Such sublime moments: Vince Gill pouring high-pitched purity and traces of his club days onto Merle Haggard’s “I Can’t Be Myself.” Jason Mraz lovingly saluting his grandfather – and wondering “what happened to the family farms?” – with his own tale, “Frank D Fixer,” or getting very delicate and Damien Rice-y on “I Won’t Give Up.” Most surprising of all: the unmistakable voice of Emmylou Harris bringing grandmotherly tenderness to Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.”

“One of the saddest songs ever written,” Ann Wilson remarked when it was over, Emmylou’s fingers still mildly trembling and Gill’s lilting licks still ringing in the air. “Right up my alley,” the country legend replied.

Wilson, whose tremendous pipes had already shined alongside her sister Nancy’s fretwork on Heart’s 1979 gem “Dog & Butterfly” and a rich reading of Gene Clark’s “Through the Morning, Through the Night” (better-known recently via Robert Plant & Alison Krauss’ version), followed Harris’ selected tear-jerker with one of her own: “Sand.” An emotionally resonant piece that sneaks up on a chills-inducing apex, it was written for the longtime gardener of her Seattle home, who died of AIDS and whose ashes were scattered on the grounds.

Dr. Dog now has more than a decade behind them as a recording project, issuing eight LPs in that time, most recently the October release B-Room, on Anti- Records. Those works have only gained deeper meaning for the group's core audience in a way that wouldn’t make sense for people discovering Dr. Dog today. You had to be there, and it’s hard to say where “there” exactly was. Probably Oregon, likely in a dorm room.

That’s the best explanation why so many fans sang along with Toby Leaman (above) to “Shadow People” at Wednesday night's very sold-out stop at the Observatory in Santa Ana from the now substantially popular band, with an encore performance slated for the next night at the Wiltern in Los Angeles. The even mix of (often bearded) male and female twentysomethings, many wearing Kangols or beanies, knew that feel-good tune, a Dan Auerbach-assisted track from 2010's Shame, Shame, and joined the band in earnest, feeling every word.

But those lyrics, describing shady characters one might see on the streets of a rough neighborhood, weren't really uplifting or even sentimental. Dr. Dog's audiences these days seem to buy the vibe of the outfit, not matter how thin the content may get.

After all, these six men from Pennsylvania mirror them, with their beenies and beards and well-worn clothing a week overdue for a wash. The sound of the band is solidified in familiarity, easily relatable to both the old-timey folk of Mumford & Sons or the Southern alternative roots-rock of Kings of Leon. From this vantage point, Dr. Dog’s ascendancy almost seems inevitable: they make precisely the music an A&R stylist might advise a young band to play if they want to make money in 2014. Yet they do so capably, with a commendable lighting display (including a side-stage marquee, this night quoting Steely Dan), a well-chosen set list punctuated by an offbeat cover (Architecture in Helsinki's “Heart It Races”) and enough drama to keep the crowd hippie-dancing the whole night.

Who is more to blame when a show doesn’t seem to ever reach the roaring energy level you know it should have – the artists or the audience?

I almost always accuse the former whenever this chicken-or-egg conundrum comes up. If the act in question had been stronger, then the audience would have given more in return, right? Maybe not if you’re anywhere in Southern California. Except San Diego – those people are always up for a good time, it seems. But O.C. crowds can be relentlessly chatty, L.A. gatherings notoriously aloof and indifferent, even toward someone enthralling.

Kaiser Chiefs, the hard-working U.K. quintet out of Leeds that played L.A.’s El Rey Theatre Tuesday night roughly a month ahead of issuing its fifth album in nearly a decade of work, are certainly not enthralling. Consistent is more like it, with a jagged feel for sonic propulsion and an overall rawness to their rock that comes in part from not being Londoners.

Since losing drummer Nick Hodgson, who departed for other projects in 2012, and replacing him with equally solid Vijay Mistry, the group has gotten back to the basics of its approach – those kinetic elements and chanted melodies that were so ear-grabbing on 2005 debut Employment – and re-amplified frontman Ricky Wilson’s political voice with its next set, Education, Education, Education & War, due April 1. (“It is not a prank,” Wilson quipped about the release date.)